Space Boy

tiny fists reach up towards the night sky and
he wants to touch them, touch the stars,
gather them like glowing seashells in his palms
and let them warm his chest on cold nights

the tangle of cool circuitry weaves under
his skin and metal and flesh become one
lifting him up higher and higher and it’s
close enough to burn in the sun

the only lover Space Boy knows is the cosmos,
shaped like rosy bouquets and valentine
chocolates from the store down the street
he recites equations for relativity like poetry

love notes in glass bottles are thrown
into the sky, but shatter at his feet

Paper Valentine

He wants to take the word “Love” and
crumple it up like a paper Valentine;
Stuff it into his mouth,
Grind it down,
Swallow it clean.

He wants to take the gaudy pieces
Of candy and crush them under
The heel of his boot
And then snort the dust
If only to feel the burn
Of something that isn’t
Heartbreak.

He wants to smash the memories
Like a broken coffee pot on a lazy
Sunday morning and then crunch
The glass into his hands,
Across his palms, and smear
The saccharine
Blood across his face like
A savage preparing for war.

But he does none of this. He
Crumbles like stale cake and
Waits for someone to move him
and his cracked frosting heart
With the rest of the rotting refuse.

Drowsy Bifurcation

She’s sunshine in the form of dark
edges and half-nibbled jars of strawberry
frosting sweet enough to make you
sick just by looking at it. You touch her
charcoal-smudged cheek and drag fingers

down along the distant column of her neck,
smearing dark lines that steep like
rooibos tea a little on the burnt side—
always a little on the burnt side.

You keep a messy room but a tidy
heart, books scattered but the walls
scrubbed clean of dirt until your
nails bleed from the hydrogen peroxide,
a parochial washing of your whimsy
because you think maybe— maybe—
it’s just something your soul needs.

The knot of time remains firm around
the hollow of your throat and she—
a thin dash of burnable sunlight trickling
into your atmosphere— and she— the
dark seductive curve of a calligraphy

pen at an errant hour of the night—
and she slackens the rope and sends
you on your way, stumbling, jealously
reverent, palms bent hopelessly
towards the sky— searching.

Weird Love

It’s the brittle tenderness of a realization
founded upon unsurety, snagged in
between shreds of fluctuating identity of
both personal and private and why can’t
they just function like— like a normal fucking
thing.

A unit. A— a not quite couple, not
quite less than that, but something wonderful,
something terribly idiosyncratic with its own
mechanistic way of existing; visceral with its
mandible and black beetle wings, tangible
in its palpability of conscientious foreboding.

He breathes out and lets hands pass through
his chest like they belong there, nestled among
viscerae and sneaky stowaway fragments of
two fingers tugging at stiffly ironed shirt collars,
and he swallows— the taste of— of black licorice
sits on the back of his tongue like lead, the
taste of— of ablution beads like morning dew
and dribbles down his throat with every
second he lets pass, coiled up in nondescript

nonchalance like maybe they can just—
just. It’s a Weird Love. Drenched in emotional
obscurity that would make Aphrodite Urania
weep porcelain tears. He’s stuck in the thicket
of his own haste, boxed in by invisibilities that
elude him like Sunday Morning crossword
puzzles over burnt coffee and burnt toast and
burnt ego and just— just—

maybe he can move towards the horizon, emerge
from his self-pioneered exile of contempt; those
awfully lovely hands pulling him by the ribcage
and snapping each bone with a tenderness he’s
denied himself for so long.

Maybe there is value in contingencies that
overflow and overflood the basin, in khaki
pants and leather belts lingering lovingly
on the backs of chairs, in the awkwardly
contemptuous not-quite-right way they perfectly
slot together, elbows and broken ribs, the glimmer
of a morning thrush upending a black beetle.

Tangibility

We savor the darkened silence of
an unborn dawn as I
trace over the
arch of your brow,
quietly admiring the
contours,
slopes,
and shifting shadows of
your untroubled face

I whisper how you’re
poetry waiting to happen,
words brimming
with your existence
eager to fall across my
coffee-stained notebooks
at 4am
as I try to capture the
tangible curve of your
stubbled jaw,
the taut stretch of
fresh skin over your
scabbed knuckles
(not because you’re
a fighter, but because
you’re clumsy and had
fallen off your bike.)

I feel the curve of
your smile,
how the corners of your
naturally sleepy eyes
crinkle with
bashful delight
and I-

Ah, my alarm.

Ah, reality.

Thread

The sinking horizon,
With its cornflower blues and
Bursting fuchsias and
Dancing vibrant salmons
It’s the work of a genius from an era long forgotten and
It’s every color of our too human souls
Clouded with love,
Every single
Word
Thought
Feeling
I could never breathe life into
Without fucking up,
Bursting painfully out of my chest and
Into your trusting hands, clenching tight as
You wrap your calloused fingers around
The red silken threads
The very same hands that hold all my pieces together,
The hands that steer us, steer this old muscle car
Across the bursting landscape and
Across the red dirt and
Dark asphalt and
Crunching gravel
Across it all and into the starry unknown
Where fate is swallowed whole
Like a flame under a thumb